Next to the death of a loved one, the ending of a relationship is the most painful experience most people will ever go through. Coming Apart is a first-aid kit for getting through the ending. It is a tool that will enable you to live through the end of your relationship with your self-esteem intact.

Daphne Rose Kingma, the undisputed expert on matters of the heart, explores the critical facets of relationship breakdowns:

- Love myths: why we are really in relationships
- The life span of love
- The emotional and unconscious processes of parting
- How to get through the ending
- ow to create a personal workbook for finding resolution

Originally published in 1987, and continuously in print since then, with more than half a million copies sold, Coming Apart has been an important resource for hundreds of thousands of readers experiencing the pain and stress of a break-up. For anyone going through the ending of a relationship Kingma is a caring, sensitive guide.

This re-packaged edition includes a new introduction by the author.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER 1

A Hand to Hold

Ending a relationship is so painful and makes us feel so awful—bad, hopeless, inadequate, desperate, lost, lonely, and worthless—that most of us are afraid we won’t live through it. We feel bad about what our families will think, we’re afraid of what the neighbors will think, we feel terrible for our children, we worry about leaving our houses, and we’re anxious about our financial futures. But worst of all, we feel badly about ourselves. Not only are we losing context, history, and the familiar choreographies of our lives, but we are also losing a sense of who we really are and we get shaken to the core about our own self-worth.

At precisely the moment when we most need some perspective, some sense that there are reasons besides our own failures to account for what is happening, we are most inclined to take the blame entirely upon ourselves. It is exactly because it is such a natural inclination to define the ending of a relationship as a personal failure—and, consequently, to go through what is often a devastating crisis in self-esteem—that it is terribly important to see that there are always some other factors operating when a relationship ends.

Rather than viewing the end of a relationship as a statement of personal failure, I believe there are always good, legitimate, and understandable reasons why relationships end. These reasons have to do with the chemistry and process of relationships themselves.

In our individual lives, relationships are one of the most important vehicles by which we create our identities and through which we define ourselves. Since this is the case, it may be that we will create a number of relationships to achieve that self-definition, and, consequently, we may end one or several relationships in a single lifetime.

A relationship is a process and not a destination. It is not necessarily the final emotional resting place of the persons who enter into it, but a vital and growing entity that has a life—and a lifetime—of its own.

While we don’t give it much thought, our most strongly internalized myth about love is that “love is forever.” Our popular music and literature continually assert this, and even aside from this encouragement, we tend to see relationships as permanent, to assume that once they have begun, they will go on, immutably, forever.

And yet, with increasing frequency, relationships do end. One out of every two marriages ends, and uncounted numbers of short- and long-term unions not legalized by marriage also end. These stunning statistics certainly prove that love is not forever, yet when our relationships end, we judge ourselves harshly, according to the values implied by the myth of forever.

The truth is that since we first embroidered this myth on our hearts, our relationships have gone through innumerable transformations, while our thinking about them has not. As a result, an incredible number of people are suffering through the trauma of ending their relationships with guilt, rage, self-flagellation, and a profound loss of self-esteem as the only emotional hallmarks of parting.

We all seem to be experts at falling in love. We even have a number of commonly agreed upon rituals for courting. But we don’t know much about what goes on inside of a relationship, and we know even about how to end one. Survivors of ended relationships haven’t left us much of a trail as to how they made it through this painful rite of passage. We know that there are some survivors, that hardly anyone dies or ends up in an insane asylum because of having ended a relationship. Indeed, among the “survivors,” we know many examples of transformed men and women, people who are happier after their break-ups and divorces. But we don’t know how they made it through the terrible experience.

That’s one of the reasons endings are so difficult. We don’t know how to do them. We don’t know how to get through the endings of relationships. We’ve all seen people around us going through their endings (or we’ve even done it once or twice ourselves), and what we see are people in pain, bouncing off the walls emotionally and having to go through radical upheavals in their lives and circumstances. In general, our observations teach us that the endings of relationships are frightening indeed, and this makes us very afraid of going through an ending of our own. Sometimes we are even afraid to acknowledge that the dissolution of the relationship might actually be an improvement because we are so afraid of going through whatever we’ll have to go through in order to accomplish it.

One of our greatest fears about ending a relationship is that in the process of parting we will have to experience feelings that will overwhelm us and from which we will never be able to recover. We all suspect that the ending of our relationship is going to take us into some deep emotional waters. We are already feeling vaguely out of control as we contemplate the possibility of the ending, and we sense that the ending itself will take us in over our heads emotionally and leave us feeling totally out of control. This fear is so immense—and so pervasive—that even if a soothsayer could tell us unequivocally that in twenty-five years we would still be as unhappy in our present relationship as we are now, we would probably still be afraid of ending it. Many of us would rather do anything—including continuing to live in a miserable, lifeless, spirit-defeating relationship—than go through all the feelings of ending a relationship.

Another great fear is that, once having ended our present relationship, we will never love or be loved again. While this feeling is very frightening, it has been my experience that, for the most part, this is not the case; in fact, an overwhelming majority of my clients who ended relationships went on to establish new and much more satisfying unions. These happier relationships resulted when people were willing to learn the lessons their previous relationships had to teach.

I have helped hundreds of people through the process of ending their relationships: people who precipitated the ending, people who resented the ending, and couples who mutually agreed upon the ending. My experience is that whether you leave or were left, if you are willing to go through the process of ending in a directed and thoughtful way, without avoiding any part of the emotional process, you can go on to establish a new and more satisfying relationship.

The purpose of this book is to hold out a hand to anyone who is already going through the ending of a relationship and who, as a result, is feeling all the difficult, scary, and unfamiliar feelings that accompany a parting. (If you are not sure your relationship is ending or should end, begin by reading the coda, which starts on page 155.) By showing you that relationships do have legitimate reasons for ending, by guiding you through the normal emotional stages that occur, and by providing you with a first-aid kit for getting through the ending, this book will enable you to live through the end of your relationship with yourself and your self-esteem intact.